Over at the utlra-right-wing website World Net Daily, Jonathan Wells has posted a characteristically ignorant and dishonest essay entitled “Why Darwinism is Doomed.” Yawn. P. Z. Myers takes care of business with this smackdown. Worth reading both for the joy of seeing Wells' rhetorically dismembered, and for the clear description of some recent research into the evolution of the human brain. Ed Brayton also piles on.
Incidentally, I 've been staring at the computer screen for a while trying to devise a new topic for my series of CSICOP essays. Alas, it seems that ID has been so utterly bereft of any substance lately, that I find myself at a loss for topics to write about. Anyone have any suggestions?
- Log in to post comments
More like this
How bad have things gotten for the ID folks? They're pathetically excited about the publication of Jonathan Wells' new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Drwainism and Intelligent Design.
It used to be that the ID folks were keen to persuade us that they were going to revolutionize science.…
There are days when I simply cannot believe how dishonest the scoundrels at the Discovery Institute can be. This is one of them. I just read an essay by Jonathan Wells that is an appalling piece of anti-scientific propaganda, an extremely squirrely twisting of some science news. It's called "Why…
I'm not sure why, but it's been a while since I've delved into the cesspit of pseudoscience that is the Discovery Institute's propaganda organ, Evolution News & Views. Perhaps it was because I simply got tired of diving into the depths of stupid. Of course, that then begs the question of why I'…
Correcting Jonathan Wells' misrepresentations is practically a full time job. He's been yammering away in the Yale Daily News lately, trying to defend his absurd disagreements with evolution, and he's just digging his hole deeper and deeper. In his latest, he's trying to argue for his abuse of the…
Hmm. I looked at your list of essays. And a suggestion occurred to me.
One thing that always fascinates me--is how do you explain the 'random' component of natural selection to non-scientists in a way that will help them appreciate how the chance factor works in evolution. I remember a woman, skeptical about evolution, once telling me that this part of the theory always struck her as seeming like voodoo. She wasn't a fundie or a Bible nut, but she didn't get the 'random' aspect of evolution and felt that it was vague because scientists themselves didn't really have an explanation.
Anyway, that's one idea.
:)
How about trying to find the research that's supposedly going on in the ID world. In 15 years or so since ID was first proposed there's been a TON of evolution research, yet I'm not aware of any real, verifiable, ID research.
All I ever hear is the claim that ID is a science and that research is going on, but the only thing I *see* is articles and books that try to disprove evolution; as if finding flaws in evolution would prove ID right. (Not that they ever actually do find flaws, but it's so cute when they try. It's almost like they're real thinking people.)
Everyone loves a top ten list. How about a top ten of the latest and greatest findings on the evolutionary landscape?
What about a recommended reading list for those of us who love the topic and the discussions but need to re-energize calcified brain cells? It seems that the occasional article in Discover magazine hasn't been anywhere near enough to get me up to speed on things (boy, I really miss Isaac Asimov!). I love your blog, by the way, and those listed on your blogroll, but I always feel as if I've come in on the middle of the conversation....
How about doing an article on the REAL controversies in evolution research. Its a constant debating point for anti-evolutionists to 'teach the controversy' however I've never actually seen a genuinely real controversy being brought up by the ID-iots, its always really silly points like there is no evidence for common descent or that there are no transitional fossils.
As scientists and educators we should see nothing wrong with teaching about the actual points in biological evolution that are, to date, unclear or unresolved but at least lets be clear about what these points are rather than let the other side propogate the suggestion that particular evolutionary points with mountains of published evidence and essentially proven to all serious scientist are a mystery.
DI maintains a list of peer-reviewed, scientific, ID literature.
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2640&…
It runs to around 30 items. Of course, the notions of "peer-review" and "scientific" are stretched to their breaking points. The "peer-reviwed" claim for Behe's book was dismantled during the Dover trial.
Behe has a new article available today at:
http://www.proteinscience.org/cgi/reprint/ps.04802904v1
Haven't read beyond the abstract yet, but a scientific offering from Behe is a rare bird indeed
Whoops, 2004 (thought it was sounding familiar) :-/
I recommend writing on the nonsensical division creationists draw between what they call micro- and macroevolution. This drives me crazy. For one thing, it simply makes no sense to admit the process on the small scale and refuse to consider what happens to the small scale over long time periods (the I-believe-in-inches-but-not-miles problem). Also, in my education in evolutionary biology, macroevolution as a topic of study was not the study of big anatomical changes in a species but rather the study of evolutionary patterns that become apparent when looking at levels higher than that of the species.